[ed. If you've read Mary Roach's fascinating (and frequently humorous) book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers you'll have a good idea about the incredible number of things that can be done with a human body after you've donated it to medical (and forensic) science. Not for me.]
Just beyond the gates is where I meet Kate Spradley, a youthful, petite, and unfailingly polite woman of forty. She has short, mousy hair that’s often clipped in place with a barrette, and dresses in yoga-studio t-shirts that explain her slim, almost boyish figure. Kate is so utterly normal that it takes a moment to register the peculiarity of her life’s work: she spends her days handling and cataloguing human remains.
Kate, an associate professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, does most of her work at their Forensic Anthropology Center (FACTS)—the centerpiece of which is the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility (FARF), the largest of America’s five “body farms.” Including Kate, FACTS has three full-time researchers, a rotating crew of anthropology graduate students and undergraduate volunteers, and a steady influx of cadaver donations from both individuals and their next of kin—brought in from Texas hospitals, hospices, medical examiners’ offices, and funeral homes. When I arrive, Kate is helping lead a weeklong forensics workshop for undergrads, spread out across five excavation sites where skeletal remains have been buried to simulate “crime scenes.” Under a camping shelter, out of the intense sun, she stands before a carefully delineated pit that contains one such skeleton: jaws agape, rib cage slightly collapsed, leg bones bent in a half-plié. In the time since it was hidden here, a small animal has built a nest in the hollow of its pelvis.
Over a year ago, back when he was “fully fleshed” (as they say), this donor was placed out in the field under a two-foot-high cage and exposed to the elements, his steady decomposition religiously photographed and recorded for science. Across the property are dozens of cadavers in various stages of rot and mummification, each with its purpose, each with its expanding file of data: the inevitable changes to the body that the rest of us willfully ignore are here obsessively documented. For the past six years, FACTS has been collecting data on human “decomp” while steadily amassing a contemporary skeletal collection (about 150 individuals now) to update our understanding of human anatomy. More specifically, for the forensic sciences, FACTS works to improve methods of determining time since death, as well as the environmental impact on a corpse—particularly in the harsh Texan climate. Texas Rangers consult with them, and law enforcement officers from around the state come to train here each summer, much like this collection of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds.
While her students continue brushing dirt from bone, Kate offers to take me on a walking tour of the cages. Or, as she gently puts it: “I’ll show you some things.”
As we wander down the grassy path in the late spring heat, the first thing I encounter is the smell. “Is that nature or human?” I ask.
“Oh, I can’t smell anything right now—sometimes it depends on what direction the wind is blowing. But probably human.”
The smell of rotting human corpses is unique and uniquely efficient. You need never have experienced the scent before, but the moment you do, you recognize it: the stench of something gone horribly wrong. It reeks of rotten milk and wet leather. (...)
The odor is strong as I walk among the cages, the air redolent with the heavy, sour-wet scent of these bodies letting go of their bile, staining the grasses all around them. I look at the sprawl, each individual in its strange shelter, shriveled and shocked-looking; each with more or less of its flesh and insides; each, in its post-person state, given a new name: a number. They died quietly, in an old-age home; they died painfully, of cancer; they died suddenly, in some violent accident; they died deliberately, a suicide. In spite of how little they had in common in life, they now lie exposed alongside one another, their very own enzymes propelling them toward the same final state. Here, in death, unintentionally, they have formed a community of equals.
by Alex Mar, Oxford American | Read more:
Image: "Passing Through—60 minutes in Foster City, California," by Ajay Malghan
